Unfortunately, a couple of things about RSS aren't "Really Simple" — namely, the history and politics. There are different versions, divergent formats, and even disagreement as to what RSS stands for: Along with "Really Simple Syndication," you'll spot "RDF Site Summary" and "Rich Site Summary".
Ugh! Our advice is to not dwell on these details when you're getting started.
In this introductory tutorial, we will build a sample RSS file in the widely-supported 0.91 format. While the 0.91 format is admittedly cruder than some newer versions, it's super-easy to understand and it gets the job done. Not coincidentally, it also happens to be the most popular type of RSS. Version 0.91 is also the best foundation for migrating to RSS 2.0, the latest format born of the same company (Userland Software) behind the 0.9x versions. RSS 2.0 extends the simple 0.91 format with some handy new elements, and via support for optional modules to carry metadata.
RSS 2.0's competition, if you will, is RSS 1.0. Version 1.0 is a totally separate standard created independently of the 0.9x and 2.0 efforts by a non-commercial working group. The 1.0 standard is not compatible with RSS 0.9x or RSS 2.0.
What's the big difference? RSS 1.0 was designed around the W3C's RDF (Rich Data Format) standard. Now, RDF is heady stuff, a metadata standard that's championed by those idealists interested in creating a Semantic Web. For your average HTML hacker, though, RDF markup is more complex, requires more bandwidth, and is just generally harder to grok.
As of press time, the tried-and-tested RSS 0.91 feed format remains the most popular, accounting for fifty percent of the feeds listed on the popular RSS
directory Syndic8.com. Only twenty-five percent of feeds are offered in the RSS 1.0 format, while the other twenty-five percent are split between RSS 2.0 and other 0.9x versions. Rough-and-tumble debates have raged over which format is best, but truth is, today's quality RSS aggregators and tools handle most every flavor of RSS.
But like I said, that's all history and politics. Let's get started coding and see what-all's in a simple 0.91 RSS feed.
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